Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 09:32:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: An article by Graham Usher


Candle in the storm
By Graham Usher
Al-Ahram Weekly5-11 April
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/528/re1.htm


The main Land Day march in Israel this year was like
an oasis in a region in turmoil. That precisely was
its significance. Graham Usher reports from the
Galilee village where Land Day began 25 years ago 


The six women knelt before freshly tilled graves on
the worn steps leading up to the stone monument in
Saknin, a village of 24,000 Palestinians in Israel's
Galilee. The inscription on the memorial reads "In
memory of those felled on Land Day, 30 March 1976."
But the mothers and sisters were not grieving the six
Palestinians shot dead by Israeli police 25 years ago.
They were mourning their sons and brothers, two of the
13 Palestinians shot dead by Israeli police six months
ago, when they and thousands of others protested, not
this time against land confiscation, but for their
nation in solidarity with their kin in the West Bank
and Gaza. 

Land Day this year interwove the two causes of land
and nation like never before. Nationally, it recalls
the day the million or so Palestinian citizens of
Israel finally threw off the 1948 "defeat of their
fathers" and took on the Jewish state, embodied,
typically, in policies aimed at seizing 5,000 acres of
their land in the Galilee. Politically, it consecrates
the moment when those same citizens ceased being
anonymous and often derided "Israeli Arabs" and became
again part of the wider Palestinian people. And the
resonance of that transformation has been felt ever
since, both within them and beyond. 

In Saknin this year, for example, tens of thousands of
Palestinians from all over Israel marched under a
flotilla of Palestinian flags, splashed here and there
with the red of Lenin and the green of Mohamed. And
for the first time ever they were joined by several
hundred Jews from Israel's various peace movements
under the white and blue banner of "Equality for
Israeli Arabs" and, among the more radical streams,
"Down with Israeli apartheid." 

For the leader of Israel's Communist Party, Mohamed
Baraka, this coming together was the true import of
the event, especially after a week in which 14
Palestinians and three Israeli Jews had been killed,
most of them civilians, five of them children. 

"It demonstrates the unity of all Palestinian
political forces with Israel's genuinely democratic
forces, and that the divisions between us are not Jew
versus Arab, but political divisions caused by civil
inequality and the denial of our national rights,"
said Baraka. He also emphasised that the march in
Saknin was peaceful. "Not a stone was thrown," he
remarked, "because not a police officer was in sight."


The same could not be said in the occupied territories
-- where the only coming together between Israeli Jews
and Palestinian Arabs these days is conducted with
tanks and helicopter rockets on one side and stones
and machine guns on the other. And where the only
political struggle is an utterly callous media war
over which people commit the worst atrocities. 

It is pretty clear which side commits the most. As the
marchers stretched from Saknin to its sister Galilee
village of Araba, elsewhere five Palestinians were
shot dead by Israeli army fire as they approached the
blockaded southern exit of Nablus, aptly nicknamed the
"death trap". Two more were killed in Ramallah in a
similar cul-de-sac and by similar hands. Meanwhile,
tank-versus-gun battles exploded in Hebron, Gaza and
Beit Jala. 

Land Day was scarcely cooler across the region. In
Lebanon, some 50,000 Lebanese and Palestinians marched
through Beirut's southern suburbs bound together by
slogans of "Death to America! Death to Israel!" And in
Amman, Jordanian and Palestinian demonstrators
assailed Arab leaders for bringing "peace with the
Zionist enemy" when what was really needed was "guns."


For these protesters "Land Day" is the harbinger of
another war between an Israel led by an
unreconstructed Ariel Sharon on one side and their
oppressed, occupied and humiliated nation on the
other. In response, opinion polls in Israel show that
50 per cent of Israeli Jews hold "negative views"
toward those one-in-five of their citizenry who are
Palestinian and that 70 per cent seek not peace with
the Arab world but a "unilateral separation" from it. 

Buffeted between such gales, the tentative joining of
hands in Saknin was not only rare but also courageous,
thought Marwan Darwish, an inhabitant of Galilee's Umm
Fahim village, who fought on the first Land Day and
marched on the 25th. 

"On the Palestinian side, it shows a new level of
political maturity among our political and community
leadership," he said. "And that maturity says we
cannot denounce the Israeli Jewish left for abandoning
us during the events of October and then refuse their
participation when they seek to show solidarity with
us on Land Day." 

And on the Israeli Jewish side the march shows the
first signs of humility. For as the marchers wound
their way from Saknin to Araba, the procession was led
by Palestinian community organisations hoisting the
Palestinian flag, followed by various Palestinian
political parties with their political and civil
slogans, and tailed by the Israeli Jewish peace groups
who, mostly, kept their mouths shut. 

For Darwish that sequence and that silence was as
significant as the march's size. "For once it showed
the Israeli left accepting to follow our agenda rather
than dictate it, and accepting finally that our agenda
today is national as well as political and civil." 

Against the storms gathering over the region, maturity
and humility may seem frail candles. But they need to
be sheltered. They are the only lights there are. 



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